How to get hay, and how to keep animals fed
Where hay actually comes from, how much your barn eats each day, and whether the auto feeder is worth 5,000g.
The short answer
Cut medium or large grass with your sword — that is the only tool that cuts grass, and there is no scythe in the game. Grass drops hay less than four times in a hundred, so most players buy it from Hayden for 50g each or refine it from six Stone once the Stone Refinery is built.
Cutting grass is the only free source
There is no scythe in Fields of Mistria. Grass is cut with your sword — the one item you start the game holding. The axe and the pickaxe do nothing to grass at all, which is why a lot of players spend their first season assuming hay simply is not obtainable yet.
Only grown grass pays out. A freshly sprouted tuft drops nothing, however many times you swing at it.
| Grass | Chance of a drop | What drops |
|---|---|---|
| Small | none | — |
| Medium | 5% | Hay or Grass Seed, even odds |
| Large | 7.5% | Hay or Grass Seed, even odds |
The two possible items share a single roll, so a tile of large grass yields Hay a little under four times in a hundred, and Grass Seed about as often. One item per drop, never a stack. Whatever drops lands on the ground where the grass stood — there is no silo and no automatic storage anywhere in the game, so you have to walk over it.
Hay
Grass SeedThe ranching perk Feeding Frenzy doubles the amount that drops rather than the chance of dropping. It is a first-tier perk, so it is available from ranching level 1 for 15 essence, and it is the cheapest thing you can do to a hay routine.
The sources that do not depend on luck
Grass cutting is free but slow, and it costs you the grass. Three sources are steadier:
- Hayden's Shop sells Hay and Grass Seed for 50g each. Both are in stock from your first day, with nothing to unlock first.
- The Stone Refinery turns 6 Stone into one Hay in ten minutes. You already know the recipe; what you need is the refinery itself, which is built at the Mines Entrance through a town story quest well into the mid game. After that, anyone who mines regularly never buys hay again.
- Balor's Wagon carries both on rotation, so it is worth a look when it is in town.
StoneGrowing grass instead of hunting for it
Grass spreads on its own, but only across the wild, untended parts of your farm, and only a few new tufts every couple of days. That is far too slow to feed a barn.
To place grass where you want it, craft Grass Starter at The Mill from 2 Grass Seed and 1 Sod. One takes twenty minutes and plants a 2×2 patch of small grass, and it only works on your own farm.
Grass Starter
SodFrom there it grows a stage a night: small becomes medium the next morning, and medium usually becomes large the morning after. Some medium tufts stall and never reach full size, so a mature grass field is always a mix of the two. Both sizes drop hay, so a stalled tuft is not wasted — it just pays at the lower rate.
Two things quietly work against you here. The Growth spell, learned from the earth seal in the mines, takes grass all the way from small to large in a single cast for 8 mana, which is the fastest way to prepare a cutting field. And the woodcrafting perk Deliberate Debris II stops new grass appearing on the farm as well as new debris — it reads as a tidiness perk, but it ends natural grass regrowth entirely. Take it only once you are growing all your grass deliberately.
What a barn actually eats
One filled trough slot feeds one animal for one day. Nothing is shared and nothing carries over, so the daily bill is simply the number of animals living in the building:
| Building | Animals | Feed per day |
|---|---|---|
| Small barn or coop | 4 | 4 |
| Medium barn or coop | 8 | 8 |
| Large barn or coop | 12 | 12 |
Large animals eat hay and small ones eat Grass Seed, and the troughs enforce it — a barn trough will not accept small-animal feed and a coop trough will not accept hay. Animals help themselves at 10am, again when you leave the building, and once more at the end of the day, so you do not have to be present.
Better feed does not go further; it only raises hearts faster. The full comparison of feed tiers, hearts and production sits on the ranch animals page.
Letting them graze, and when not to
Any animal you let out on the farm will find medium or large grass and eat it. That counts fully as its feeding for the day — no penalty, and it still produces — but it is credited at the plain-feed rate, and the grass tile is destroyed outright. Grazing is free food that eats your hay supply.
Being outdoors is worth +5 hearts on a clear day and −5 on a rainy or snowy one. So the rule is simple: let them out when the sky is clear, keep them in and use the trough when it is not.
Animals will also eat any ripe, edible crop they can reach, which is worth more hearts than grass but costs you the harvest. That behaviour, and the rest of the farm rules the game never states, are covered in watering, seasons and the rules the game never tells you.
Is the auto feeder worth it?
Auto Feeder costs 5,000g at Hayden's Shop and only appears on the shelf once your ranching skill reaches level 45. It can only be placed in a large barn or coop, on the platform that is already built into those rooms.
Auto FeederIt holds 54 slots of edible items and feed. Each morning it fills every empty trough slot in its own building, spending one stored item per slot and converting it into the correct feed for that building’s animal size. It does nothing for a second building and nothing for animals left outside.
The conversion is where the value is, because it upgrades ordinary produce:
| What you store | Trough tier it becomes |
|---|---|
| Tree fruit such as Apple | Ultimate |
| A slow crop harvested once, such as Cabbage | Ultimate |
| A crop that regrows, such as Strawberry | Deluxe |
| Berries from a bush | Normal |
| A one-star cooked dish | Quality |
| A two-star or better dish | Ultimate |
Loading it with tree fruit is the cheapest way to keep a large barn on top-tier feed. The one thing to avoid is feeding it expensive cooking: a five-star dish handed to an animal directly is worth more than the same dish put through the feeder, which flattens everything above two stars to the same tier.
Winter changes less than you expect
Grass keeps growing through winter. Nothing wilts it, and the season rollover does not clear it the way it clears out-of-season crops.
Two things still argue for a stockpile. Each change of season replaces a good deal of open grass with fresh rocks, branches and weeds, so you come out of it with less field than you went in with. And winter brings four to six days of snow, on which letting animals out costs hearts instead of gaining them — those are exactly the days you want a full trough. Going into winter with a couple of stacks of hay, or with the auto feeder loaded, removes the problem entirely.